There have been a few new hosting options lately - it's really getting very cheap to host a server. Case in point: Digital Ocean, which provides $5 root-access IP addresses. Not much storage, granted (20 gig), but the servers in question are blazingly fast, SSD drives and multiple cores for a little more money. Outgoing bandwidth is measured in terabytes, and incoming is not metered at all.
You can set up new servers with an API call.
And that's just one such hosting company. I'm going to start tracking the ones I find under this "hosting" tag. Right now I'm paying $60 a month for a dedicated server that's, what, seven years old and feeling it? That's just money wasted these days.
Another cheap hosting alternative I've seen lately is Uberspace.de, remarkable for being in Germany, which could be quite useful.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Email message threading
Jamie Zawinski explains his email threading algorithm here, the one used in Netscape back in the day. I love reading his work.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
OpenCV
http://opencv.org/ is the open-source computer vision library I keep hearing about. There's currently a Kickstarter up for using it to interpret hand drawings of a mobile UI and generate the UI skeleton, which begs the question - couldn't I use it for sketches and concept maps?
I don't see why not!
I don't see why not!
General SEO tricks for any Website template
Here's a short list of some SEO best practices that seems pretty good.
Calculating rolling cohort retention - with SQL
This kind of trick is great stuff. I don't even know how to categorize it. Well, "data science", of course, but this general kind of algorithmic sleight-of-hand is always attractive.
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
Semantic gold mine! A long-running personal project at NIST cataloging data structures and the algorithms that use them.
Data table editor for jQuery
And another nice drop-in component: a data table viewer/editor built on jQuery.
Outline editor Concord
Oh, this is nice - a drop-in outline editor component in open-source JavaScript.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Skill trees for Webdev work
A new skill tree (cheat sheet) site for Webdev work (bentobox.io [github]) hit HNN the other day, and the hivemind came up with a couple of interesting alternatives: The Odin Project with a self-contained curriculum, and the very cute Dungeons & Developers.
Note that a skill tree is essentially a semantic map of the domain of interest. I'm just sayin.
Note that a skill tree is essentially a semantic map of the domain of interest. I'm just sayin.
How to build a MOBI
The SICP book has been essentially open-sourced and there are spinoffs for different formats. The Kindle version is generated using this Github project, so it would be nice to go in and figure out how the content is handled. (It appears to reside in HTML files, oddly.)
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Summer hiatus
Due to health issues and travel (and it's always fun when those coincide) I have not really done any programming or thinking about programming for about two or three months now. So I'm coming back to a lot of my old ongoing efforts with a fresh eye, and today I had a strange epiphany:
I'm thinking of the platform for a given piece of software as ephemeral now.
For instance, one of the things I'm working on is a parser of English in order to automate some of the language-quality work I do professionally. I'd like to implement that on my usual machine, but for performance reasons it would be convenient to offload it onto the Parallella platform since I expect it will really benefit from it.
So I can't really write it in Perl because of platform conflict. OK, I know Perl will probably run fine on the managing processors - but the point here is not whether Perl will or won't work, the point is that I really want to develop the algorithms and then "compile" them to Perl or C or whatever, as needs require.
This is what Java purports to address, by the way. But I'm seeing a lot of new languages that "compile" to various high-level languages, notably JavaScript and C, and maybe this is a new modality.
Maybe what semantic programming is about, I tell myself yet again, is working out the semantic content of an algorithm, expressing it at that level, then having it run in whatever platform is required - and if that means "compiling" to a given language, then in a sense it's really coding in that language. The semantic structure is expressed in C or in Perl, but at some level it's also expressed as a bunch of semantic units that could also be used to express an explanation of the code in English, or even to derive a domain-specific language for intermediate work, a set of macros or something like that.
In other words, what I'm internalizing is that in a semantic programming paradigm the computer should be doing more of the work of coding, at a level that reflects a knowledge of the underlying purpose of each part of the code. That naturally ties back into code understanding to reverse-engineer this kind of semantic structure given existing syntactic expressions, but it's output that should logically come first.
I'm thinking of the platform for a given piece of software as ephemeral now.
For instance, one of the things I'm working on is a parser of English in order to automate some of the language-quality work I do professionally. I'd like to implement that on my usual machine, but for performance reasons it would be convenient to offload it onto the Parallella platform since I expect it will really benefit from it.
So I can't really write it in Perl because of platform conflict. OK, I know Perl will probably run fine on the managing processors - but the point here is not whether Perl will or won't work, the point is that I really want to develop the algorithms and then "compile" them to Perl or C or whatever, as needs require.
This is what Java purports to address, by the way. But I'm seeing a lot of new languages that "compile" to various high-level languages, notably JavaScript and C, and maybe this is a new modality.
Maybe what semantic programming is about, I tell myself yet again, is working out the semantic content of an algorithm, expressing it at that level, then having it run in whatever platform is required - and if that means "compiling" to a given language, then in a sense it's really coding in that language. The semantic structure is expressed in C or in Perl, but at some level it's also expressed as a bunch of semantic units that could also be used to express an explanation of the code in English, or even to derive a domain-specific language for intermediate work, a set of macros or something like that.
In other words, what I'm internalizing is that in a semantic programming paradigm the computer should be doing more of the work of coding, at a level that reflects a knowledge of the underlying purpose of each part of the code. That naturally ties back into code understanding to reverse-engineer this kind of semantic structure given existing syntactic expressions, but it's output that should logically come first.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Programming by voice
This is more manipulation of emacs by voice, but still: here. Writing Python by voice with emacs...
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Gameboy emulation
For Pokemon play, one uses an emulator on the PC or other computer (or, you know, you buy an actual Gameboy, but I'm assuming you're more interesting than that). Mostly that's VBA or VBA-M, although there are others. On Win64, VBA-M is not working for me with Pokemon Emerald, so I'm using a 32-bit VBA, but the source tree for VBA-M is on SourceForge here.
Clearly, part of this is the emulator itself and part is the UI and associated tools, so we've got to tease those threads apart. But I'm most interested in how the ROM itself works (i.e. its file structure and how all that stuff is defined). It appears to be programmed on this virtual machine in a bytecode; how does that work, and how can we pull it apart to build a new ROM or modified one? I'm pretty sure the emulator code itself is going to tell us that, but the documentation is horrible, all read-the-code-Luke with a few cryptic comments for things the authors found tricky or unexpected, I'm assuming bug fixes mostly.
Anyway, the reason Pokemon is suddenly featuring on this heretofore more general blog is that my son has a truly fascinating idea for a programming project involving emulated Pokemon. More here later if it proves feasible to do what he wants to do. But in the meantime we gotta understand and clean up this codebase, so it's code understanding to the forefront!
Clearly, part of this is the emulator itself and part is the UI and associated tools, so we've got to tease those threads apart. But I'm most interested in how the ROM itself works (i.e. its file structure and how all that stuff is defined). It appears to be programmed on this virtual machine in a bytecode; how does that work, and how can we pull it apart to build a new ROM or modified one? I'm pretty sure the emulator code itself is going to tell us that, but the documentation is horrible, all read-the-code-Luke with a few cryptic comments for things the authors found tricky or unexpected, I'm assuming bug fixes mostly.
Anyway, the reason Pokemon is suddenly featuring on this heretofore more general blog is that my son has a truly fascinating idea for a programming project involving emulated Pokemon. More here later if it proves feasible to do what he wants to do. But in the meantime we gotta understand and clean up this codebase, so it's code understanding to the forefront!
Monday, August 5, 2013
The Machine Zone
Bad user-experience patterns: the Machine Zone. This is the late-night high-channel surf, the one-more-pic-on-Facebook that you zone into for hours instead of sleeping. Great for impressions, and if your metric is stickiness, you might think you're giving your users what they want.
Are you?
Filed under UI design with a little trepidation, because "user experience" is really more something for the purpose of an app, not its implementation.
Are you?
Filed under UI design with a little trepidation, because "user experience" is really more something for the purpose of an app, not its implementation.
Express regexes with verbal expressions
Neat JS library for expression of simple regex use cases in non-incomprehensible form. This is an interesting start, but I don't see any way to extend it to more complicated use cases (identified match outputs, replacements, alternates with any nested structure, and so on).
Although for a lot of things, honestly, regexes should be replaced by explicit grammars with named components and a match specification.
Anyway, this is a nice start and deserves contemplation.
Although for a lot of things, honestly, regexes should be replaced by explicit grammars with named components and a match specification.
Anyway, this is a nice start and deserves contemplation.
Yegge on Perl
Steve Yegge always makes you think, even when he's doing something so preposterous as challenging the One True Language.
not that he's wrong
What?!?
Yeah, I have to admit he's right. Perl is a convenient place to start with a lot of problems because as glue for CPAN it really gets you close to a quick solution for nearly anything on Earth. But ultimately I think we're going to find that any one programming language is simply not going to be sufficient for every need. That, after all, is the entire point of this very blog. So even though I have a kneejerk negative reaction to any criticism of Perl, my language of choice these past ten years or so, he's still right. Perl is an antique.
I just happen to like antiques.
And honestly, seeing the Perl expression of any idea as merely the cave-wall projection of the actual program, I have to say that starting out in Perl isn't such a bad way to start approaching a problem. It's just that I find myself drifting off the rails to language design fairly quickly in the course of any given larger project.
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